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Increasingly, publishers are looking to sell through library consortia. The advantages of consortia to publishers include the ability to simplify the sales process, to help publishers increase their market penetration and communication with more libraries, and increase the speed of sales. However, all consortia are not organized in the same way, which requires that publishers work with different consortia in different ways. Publishers will need to continue to maintain their own marketing and sales staff to augment the services that may be available through the consortium, and to overcome problems such as inconsistent communications to libraries. Publishers will also need to have strategies to work with multiple consortia with overlapping memberships.

The purpose of this study is to illustrate the potentially detrimental effects on audit decision-making of certain judgmental heuristics, which can lead to systematic judgmental biases. This paper provides background on the heuristics and biases approaches to decision-making to increase auditors' awareness of the anchoring and adjustment effects affecting audit judgments adversely.

This study reports the results of an experimental research design analyzing the audit judgment of 85 auditors in Switzerland.

Based on the results of the experiment, the results indicate evidence on the existence of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic in Swiss audit judgments. The authors could identify an influence of the audit company size, the auditors' experience and the auditors' knowledge about behaviorism and anchor heuristic with regard to the anchoring and adjustment effect on audit judgment.

The experimental tasks were relatively simple abstractions from the more complex analytical review situations faced by practicing auditors. Due to the small sample size, the authors cannot ensure representativeness of the results.

Professional judgment is a skill that auditor acquires overtime, combined with experience and knowledge, that allows him to achieve reasonable judgments, being independent of other opinions and free from material biases in a given circumstance. Our results show that auditors who are aware of biases and heuristics are less prone to judgment biases.

This paper is the first to analyze the impact of auditors' explicit experience and knowledge about behaviorism and anchor heuristic on the anchoring and adjustment effect on audit judgment. Through a stronger awareness of cognitive biases, a professional skepticism can be enhanced.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the increasing expectation against two concepts, information and process scepticism. In light of the Centro case judgement, directors’ decisions are held to increasing standards of due care and diligence.

This is a conceptual paper, drawing upon archival material, including statute law, case law, regulatory guidance material and media releases in Australasia. The authors review the statutory duty of care, skill and diligence expected of non-executive directors.

Whether a director has exercised an appropriate level of reasonable care and skill and/or due diligence has been a matter for the courts to decide. Such retrospective analysis leaves directors vulnerable to the uncertainty of whether their individual interpretation of diligence matches up to that of the presiding judge. The authors provide directors with a framework to apply scepticism to information and processes provided by those on whom the directors may rely.

Two concepts are identified: reasonable reliance on others and the business judgement rule. The authors present arguments that challenge us to understand reasonable reliance, judgement and actions of directors in light of processing and information scepticism.

Directors do have a different role to that of auditors; incorporating scepticism can enable directors to fulfil their responsibility towards shareholders. By applying information and process scepticism, directors of companies can reduce the likelihood and magnitude of litigation costs and out-of-court settlements.

This paper provides a framework to apply scepticism to information and processes provided by people on whom the directors may rely.

Significant investment dollars are now allocated to companies deemed by investors as socially responsible. This socially responsible theme contends that corporations should be held accountable for the totality of their actions and decisions, including CEO compensation levels. This paper investigates whether CEO compensation levels are more associated with traditional performance measures for socially responsible firms than for firms deemed not socially responsible, with the assumption being that social choice firms will be more sensitive to and may attempt to align CEO compensation levels with corporate performance. Rank correlation analysis and regression results using nine performance variables for 270 firms indicated that CEO compensation levels at social choice companies were more highly associated with performance variables than those at nonsocial companies. The study results suggest that social choice companies, in addition to their other corporate good deeds, seem to include CEO compensation levels as a part of their overall corporate decision process.

The purpose of this study is to examine students who have recently graduated from the standard 120 credit accountancy program and compare and contrast their ethical perceptions with students who have recently graduated from the AICPA-mandated 150 credit accountancy program which includes 30 extra credits with a focus on ethics.

Recent graduated accounting students from selected Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business were asked to fill out a cross-sectional survey based on Victor and Cullen's Ethical Climate Questionnaire (ECQ) to determine whether a difference exists between the two groups' ethical perceptions. The nine hypotheses derived from the ECQ were tested using an independent sample t-test and Levene's test for the homogeneity of the variances between the two groups.

Compared with graduates of the 120 credit program, 150 credit program graduates scored significantly higher in ethical perceptions on five domains: Company Profit, Friendship, Team Interest, Personal Morality, and Rules, when testing at a confidence level of 95 percent. The two groups were not significantly different in the domains of Self-Interest, Efficiency, Social Responsibility, or Laws.

The paper includes implications for the need to encourage ethical intervention through education in the accounting curriculum. This study is part of a growing body of research for teaching ethics within the accounting profession.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study business ethics. Corporate scandals in the late 1990s and early this century led to a decline in the public's trust of the accounting profession. Since that time, the government, companies, and universities have attempted to rebuild that trust through a number of methods, such as passing laws requiring better regulation and more disclosure as well as requiring improved ethics education for future accountants.

The purpose of this study is to construct and test a new measure of auditor orientation using two audit quality-related tasks.

The sample consists of 66 Dutch and US graduate auditing students. Participants complete two tasks: one involving a lease classification and another, supplemental experiment involving a contingent liability judgment. The purpose is to construct a new measure for rules-based/ principles-based orientation. Rigorous, psychometric testing confirms that parts of tolerance for ambiguity (TOA) and need for cognition (NFC), together, form a new construct the authors identify as auditor orientation. The authors next conduct a main and supplemental experiment with novice auditor participants from both the USA and the Netherlands.

The authors begin with rigorous, psychometric testing using participants from the USA and the Netherlands. The resulting 10-item scale combines parts of TOA and NFC to reflect auditor orientation. The common themes across scale items are high (low) adaptability to complexity and a substance-over-form (form-over-substance) preference for principles-oriented (PO) (rules-oriented [RO]) auditors. Conducting two experiments, results from two distinct tasks confirm our research question; novice auditors classified as RO (PO) are more (less) likely to recommend a more aggressive/client-favorable disclosure judgment.

Auditor orientation (i.e. rules or principles) has a significant impact on the application of rules-based or principles-based standards. How the standards are applied, therefore, influences auditor decision-making and thus audit quality. However, there is a paucity of auditor orientation research to date, including a validated measure. The study contributes a new measure for future research in the related accounting standards and audit quality literatures, while also identifying a potentially important construct in auditor training.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential impact of two affiliation factors, as encapsulated by the chief financial officer's (CFO) prior organizational (alumnus vs non‐alumnus) and professional background (audit vs non‐audit ex‐partner), on auditor independence in post‐Enron and post‐HIH era.

The study is a 2×2 factorial between subjects experimental design with 52 audit partners and managers as participants. The two manipulated independent variables are client CFO prior firm affiliation (alumni vs non‐alumni) and professional background (audit partner vs non‐audit partner providing taxation, accounting and other non‐audit services).

The results of the study do not appear to signal loss of independence and professional skepticism in auditors' judgment when dealing with an alumni or ex‐auditor CFO. On average, auditors' endorsement of the client's preferred aggressive accounting treatment is low and the audit adjustment is material and significantly greater than the client's proposed adjustment.

The 2001 corporate collapses of Enron in the USA and HIH in Australia have reshaped the auditing profession. HIH, the most publicized corporate fraud in Australia resulting in estimated losses of $5 billion, was partly blamed on Arthur Andersen yielding to management's aggressive accounting policies and failure to display independence as a result of close relationships between the former partners and the audit team. As distinct from a number of prior studies conducted pre‐Enron and pre‐HIH, the results of this study, conducted with experienced audit professionals in Australia, do not support a loss of independence and professional skepticism by auditors in the current post‐Enron and post‐HIH environment and are consistent with the findings of the only other recent experimental study by Kerler III and Killough examining the closeness of the auditor‐client relationship. The results are also consistent with results of recent archival studies which find a decline in earnings management behavior, either because of reduced management incentives or reduced auditor willingness to consent. The evidence of this study lends supports to the latter explanation.

This paper aims to investigate the combined effect of two interventions, perspective taking and incentives, on auditors’ professional skepticism (hereafter skepticism) when auditing complex estimates. Specifically, this paper examines the different ways that perspective taking (management versus inspector) and incentives (absent versus reward versus penalty) combine to impact skepticism.

This paper uses an experiment with 177 experienced Big 4 auditors. The experiment used a 2 (management vs inspector perspective) × 3 (absent vs reward vs penalty incentives) between-subjects design.

In the absence of incentives, adopting a management perspective raises situational skepticism when measuring skepticism as appropriateness of management’s fair value estimate while adopting an inspector perspective raises situational skepticism when measuring skepticism as need for more evidence. The authors find some evidence that incentives complement perspective-taking by enhancing those aspects of skepticism for which perspective-taking performs poorly. When assessing management assumptions, auditors adopting an inspector perspective enhance their skepticism more substantially than those adopting a management perspective, and this enhancement is greater with rewards than with penalties. However, this study does not detect an interaction between incentive type and perspective-taking on auditor skepticism in relation to gathering additional evidence.

This paper extends the literature by shifting the focus from a single perspective to a comparison of two perspective-taking approaches and discusses how each of these approaches enhances different aspects of skepticism. This paper also illustrates the importance of the interplay between perspective-taking and incentives in enhancing auditor skepticism.

This study aims to examine whether accountability and culture have an impact on auditors’ professional scepticism. It also examines whether culture moderates the effect of accountability on auditors’ professional scepticism.

Three of the Big 4 firms in Australia and Egypt participated in an audit judgement experiment, which required them to indicate their beliefs about the risk of fraud and error at the planning stage of a hypothetical audit and evaluate the truthfulness of explanations provided by the client management. The authors examined whether their professional scepticism was influenced by accountability.

The results indicate professional scepticism differs significantly between cultures in some situations. The fact that culture influences scepticism suggests that even when auditors use the same standards (such as ISA 240 and ISA 600), they are likely to be applied inconsistently, even within the same firm. The authors, therefore, recommend that international bodies issue additional guidance on cultural values and consider these cultural differences when designing or adopting auditing standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines whether culture moderates the impact of accountability on auditors’ professional scepticism using Egyptian and Australian (Middle Eastern and Western) auditors. Prior literature suggests that individuals subject to accountability pressure increase their cognitive effort and vigilance to detect fraud and error. As the authors find evidence that culture moderates accountability pressure and as accountability affects scepticism, they add to the literature suggesting that culture can influence professional scepticism.